05.11.12

Summary: SUSE makes it clearer that people on the payroll drive the OpenSUSE project

THE DOWNLOADS of OpenSUSE got halted and barely anyone noticed or cared. SUSE is now relying on paid advocates, or as one paid booster put it, “SUSE is hiring people for the Boosters team” (akin to AstroTurf).

Andreas Jaeger, one of the paid members, writes about changes that the community is not a part of (it does not vote on anything significant at SUSE) and says:

Why do we use the word “freight train” here? The openSUSE community consists of many different people – and some of them are able to work full-time on openSUSE, perhaps as part of a team of others. Those people might have a faster drive than others – and might “roll them over”. We’d like to avoid these situations and whenever they happen to help fixing.

In other words, SUSE recognises that paid employees of SUSE (with wages that partly come from Microsoft) call the shots. So much for a “community”…

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